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Coins an overnight success — two years later

By Nick PatchSpecial to the Star

Thu., Dec. 1, 2016

With an ingenious remix album combining the Beastie Boys’ raps and Daft Punk’s meticulous beats, Toronto producer Coins recently experienced all the hallmarks of sudden around-the-world viral renown: a phone overflowing with social-media mentions, an influx of collaboration requests and millions of new listeners.

The difference? This overnight success took two and a half years.

Peter Chapman has seen a surge in would-be collaborators reaching out and he figures this has certainly boosted the profile of the "Coins" moniker, which he’s been using since 2009. (Carlos Osorio / Toronto Star)

It was March 2014 when the DJ otherwise known as Peter Chapman amused himself on a layover en route to South by Southwest by playing around with some Beastie Boys a capellas and Daft Punk samples. It started as a time-killing lark, but he found the mix was working surprisingly well. When he got back to Toronto, Chapman spent the next month working with an obsessive diligence that might impress the real chrome-helmeted duo, pouring 40 hours a week into a project that was more intricately stitched remix than simple mashup.

Finally, he issued Daft Science online in July 2014. He was met by the overwhelming sound of silence.

“Nothing happened,” recalled Chapman, 36. “It felt like a thing I ended up making for my friends. I just forgot about it.”

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Until last week, that is, when a poster on Daft Punk’s Reddit made the discovery; soon, Beastie Boys sites were similarly buzzing as fans rushed to check it out. That chatter inspired a post on the EDM site Dancing Astronaut and that’s when the momentum really built.

“I was lying in bed, there was a Facebook notification on my phone,” he remembered. “At first I thought I was tagged because someone else was doing the same thing, like ‘Hey, Pete, someone jacked your idea.’ I looked closer at the link and I was like: ‘What the hell? This is my record.’ I nudged my girlfriend awake and said, ‘Hey, somebody’s talking about the Daft Science record.’

“She grumbled and rolled over.”

Well, pretty soon the buzz was impossible to ignore. Time magazine called the eight-track album “very excellent,” AVClub deemed it “white-hot” and Esquire was particularly effusive, writing that the “incredible” project “sounds exactly like what The Weeknd is attempting with his new album or what Kanye wanted on Yeezus.” Even People magazine weighed in, concluding that it was “uncanny how well it works.”

Over its first two-plus years, the album had accumulated around 400 downloads. After going viral, Daft Science racked up 1.4 million streams in a week.

Eventually, Chapman concedes, he started to freak out.

“I kind of had a panic attack at that point,” said Chapman, who composes music for video games (Guacamelee! and LittleBigPlanet Karting) and TV shows (Bomb Girls, Durham County). “I had to turn off my notifications because my phone was going crazy.”

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It’s easy to understand the fascination with the album, given that Daft Punk has released only one record in the last decade and the Beastie Boys are retired. There’s also the fact that the album is a bona fide banger, with the Beasties’ mostly Hello Nasty-era raps proving a perfect complement to the gnarled grooves Chapman forged from Daft Punk’s early records.

Unlike blogged-about mashups that reach viral ubiquity on the strength of novelty alone, Daft Science thrills because of how natural the union feels and how creatively Chapman repurposes finely chopped Daft Punk beats.

Of course, the album is free, so Chapman hasn’t made any money from all this newfound attention. He has seen a surge in would-be collaborators reaching out and he figures this has certainly boosted the profile of the Coins moniker, which he’s been using since 2009.

Fame was never his goal, anyway; Chapman made it because he loves both artists and “remixing them felt like the closest (he’ll) ever come to working with them.”

Still, he’s encouraged that in this era of ephemeral Internet curiosities, it’s still possible for a record that wasn’t an instant crush to eventually find life.

“As an artist, you really never know what might happen,” he said. “Even if you put something out and it totally bombs, you never know what might happen in 10 years.

“It’s worth just making stuff and putting it out there. The right person might find it and the right person might post it on the right Reddit forum.”

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